01.04.13 | day nine building community iii

Today’s blog has been written by Signe Helland Nyberg, a 3rd year student at NTNU:

It is Monday, and we had to get up early and go back to work after a short break and a nice trip to Nizamabad yesterday. The layer of concrete at the bottom of the trenches had set, and we could start building with bricks! We used fired bricks for the foundation. The laying of bricks was a bit slow at first. It was very important to do good measuring work, especially on this first layer of the base.

While most of us laid bricks, some of us were still working with drawing details and drawing the plan, and Runa and I got to experiment with plaster samples for the walls. We used different ingredients, like clay, sand, cow dung and rice husk. We tried the different mixes on small parts of the walls on the barrel vault mock-up. It will be interesting to see which of the samples that looks the best tomorrow when they have all dried up!

belu and runa with a pile of bricks ready to lay

kritika passing bricks to keelan

the first course of bricks in the bottom of the trenches

froydis laying bricks

froydis measuring in the trenches

runa and ana taking a break in the shade of the tarpaulin

rajindra and vinod mixing concrete on a brick platform

ram, the mason, measuring

signe making plaster samples on the walls of the barrel vault mock-up (with the inevitable audience!)